Russkoye Radio

• 1. Introduction

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  Russkoye Radio went on air in Moscow on the 2nd of August 1995, with a simple and deliberate premise: broadcast almost exclusively in Russian. No other major radio station at the time carved out that particular niche so strictly. During its first summer on air, the station ran music from 08:00 to 22:00, no jingles, no announcements, just songs with silent gaps of five to twenty seconds between them. What kind of station builds an identity around silence and a single language? And how does a station that started with no commercial advertising become the home of one of Russia's most celebrated music award ceremonies? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. The Golden Gramophone

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  In 1996, Russkoye Radio launched the folk music award known as the Golden Gramophone. The ceremony takes place at the end of each year and has moved through several landmark Moscow venues. From 1996 to 2014, and again from 2017 to 2022, it was held at the State Kremlin Palace. The Olimpiysky Arena hosted the event in 2015 and 2016. Crocus City Hall took the ceremony in 2023, and VTB Arena has served as the venue since 2024. Parallel events run at Saint Petersburg's Ice Palace and at the Minsk Arena in Belarus, extending the award's reach across the region. A television counterpart, RU.TV, launched in 2006 to bring the station's music programming to screens as well as speakers.

• 3. Voices Between the Ads

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  Commercial advertising came to Russkoye Radio in 1996, and from the start the station gave its ad breaks a distinctive character. Each break ended with a humorous segment voiced by a named personality. Nikolai Fomenko held that role until 2009. Vadim Galygin followed from 2009 to 2012. On the 20th of December 2012, Dmitry Nagiyev took over, a tenure that lasted until the 22nd of March 2024. Anton Yuryev has voiced the segments since the 1st of April 2024. These brief comic closers gave the commercial breaks a personality of their own, turning interruption into a small recurring bit that listeners could expect and recognise.

• 4. Charting the Hits

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  The weekly chart show Russkaya Gorka debuted in 1996, hosted by Gleb Deev and airing each Saturday at 21:00 with a list of twelve top songs. By February 1999 the format had grown to twenty tracks and was renamed Golden Gramophone, shifting to a Saturday slot running from 12:00 to 14:00. The show passed through a long sequence of hosts over the years: Boris Korablyov from 2000 to 2001, Andrey Chizhov from 2001 to 2002, Alexander Karlov from 2002 to 2005, then Alla Dovlatova and Andrey Malakhov together from 2005 to 2007. Roman Yemelyanov hosted from 2007 to 2015, followed by Ivan Suvorov across September and November of that same year. The station's first program director, Stepan Stroyev, guided that early growth until 1999.

• 5. Record-Breaking Broadcasts

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  On the 22nd of September 2010, Russkoye Radio entered the Guinness World Records with a fifty-two-hour non-stop show called Russkie Pertsy. Vadim Voronov, Alisa Seleznyova, and Sergey Melnikov hosted the marathon broadcast together. A second record followed on the 3rd of April 2015, this time for the longest team radio show at sixty hours. Dmitry Olenin replaced Melnikov in the team for that attempt due to personal reasons on Melnikov's part. These endurance broadcasts were not simply stunts; they demonstrated the logistical and human stamina the station could marshal, and they placed Russkoye Radio in the international record books twice within five years.

• 6. Streams and Channels

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  In 2012, Russkoye Radio launched two themed online streams. Russkoye Kino offered soundtracks drawn from Soviet and Russian films. The Golden Gramophone stream focused on the award-winning hits the ceremony had recognised over the years. A user-customisable playlist feature ran until December 2014, when it was retired and replaced by a set of dedicated channels: Vysotsky for the music of Vladimir Vysotsky, Russky Rok for Russian rock, Bessmertny Polk for wartime songs (which replaced the earlier Russky Shanson channel in 2015), along with Hip-Hop and Detsky channels, the latter covering children's music and stories. A standalone Skazki channel, devoted to fairytales, was added later, rounding out a catalogue that stretched well beyond the station's original music-only format.

• 7. The Ukraine Controversy

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  On the 26th of June 2014, program director Roman Yemelyanov terminated Russkoye Radio's partnership with its Ukrainian affiliate, which broadcast in thirty-seven cities. The trigger was the Ukrainian branch's decision to donate ten percent of its advertising revenue, amounting to 250,000 hryvnias, to the Kyiv Rus territorial defense battalion during the Donbas conflict. The campaign carried the title Protect the Army - It Will Protect You. Yemelyanov argued that the campaign exploited the station's "Russian" name against its own branding. Russkoye Radio had operated in Ukraine since 2001 under the name Russkoye Radio Ukraina. In February 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian service stopped broadcasting entirely and was replaced by a new station called Radio Bayraktar.